Embrace

by Mark Behr

  I pick up my shoes from outside the music room’s window. From the night I climb into the smell of linoleum on the floor, fresh paint. I exit the room and go down the passage. Walk past Jacques’s door, hear the music, try to ignore it. I will not go begging to him. It’s over. This whole life. But I cannot resist. I turn around and walk back. I can hear music, Brahms’s Adagio from the Violin Concerto in D. I can say it’s on behalf of Dominic. I’ve come to speak to you about saving Dominic. I knock on his door. There is no reply. I knock again, louder. He must be here, for there is the music. Still he doesn’t open. I again want to cry, knock again. I cannot knock louder, one of the other teachers may think it is at their door. I know he is in there; can feel him. Then think of the B&O hi-fi, how it can be set to repeat over and over. I will go and check if his car is in the parking lot. I again exit the way I have come, run along the dust road behind the school. Yes, it’s there. No. The car is not there, where is he? I go back the way I’ve come. It is the allegro. Again knock. I need him, just this once. I put my head against the door and weep. I need you to help keep Dominic here. Please, please open, want to scream, no, no, no, calm down. Breathe, breathe, relax. I resolve again, no, it is over, I remind myself of the run from the river, Uncle Klaas. Satan. It is over. Only a few more weeks. No more. Nothing.

  My hand fumbles in the dressing-gown pocket. Flies to the other pocket. The key is gone. Tears flood my eyes. I have lost it. Somewhere along the road I’ve lost the instrument that will allow me back into this school. In the passage, in front of the locked door, I suppress a sob. If Jacques were here he could let me in with his. I must go back the way I’ve come.

  My brain is throbbing against my skull. It is nowhere. I go up and down the route I came, in the night, trying to remember exactly where I ran. Up and down. Back up. In two hours it will be light and I will still be out here. They will find the dummy in my bed. Then — Yes! Praise the Lord, thank you, Jesus, thank you, where I stumbled, I find it. Relief washes over me. Credo in unum Deum patrem, omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terra, visibilium omnium et invisibilium, and slowly the fear subsides.

  I unlock the library door. Credo in unum Dominum Jesum, Christum, filium Dei unigentum, qui tollis, no, no, et ex, what declension, dative, enter and turn to lock the door behind me, patre natum nobis pacem ante omn —

  The lights go on. I swing around.

  Mathison is standing at the opposite end of the balcony, one hand on the light switch. For a mad moment I tell myself he is blocking my way and I need only to walk past. He cannot keep me out of my dorm. This is my school. His other hand is in his trouser pocket.

  This, I would think later, was not the posture of a man who was there accidentally. He had the composure of one who has been waiting. Confidently. For quite a while.

  Hooded glances and open gazes from below up at the balcony where the Prime Minister has taken his place amongst his entourage. Cameramen behind shiny television cameras, rotating their lenses from aisles and down the sides of the hall. Now tipping the shafts to forty-five degrees to zoom in on the South African leader, then again slowly drop the angles, panning across the elegandy dressed audience, the orange, white and blue flags, the triangular arrangements of protea and strelitzia. The enormous stage glows with super troopers, sprays and spots illuminating the seats on which members of the orchestra are tuning instruments. Behind the grand piano with its lifted wing, above the orchestra, are the choir benches, eight deep. Into the hall’s white cavern, up into the galleries, resounds the tuning of cellos, violins and violas; the vibrating of a bass trombone as its tubes slide and its master shares a nod and quick smile with the timpani behind him to his left. Three notes of a clarinet tumble from the ceiling with its floral cornices.

  A middle-aged man dressed in black evening suit crosses the stage and holds up his hands. His teeth sparkle into a smile; he requests the audience to not look into the television cameras should they become aware that they are being focused on. The audience laughs. He reminds them that this is a live broadcast that will present no second chances and also that no clapping should occur until the Mass’s fifth and final movement has been completed. While he speaks, last-minute arrivals are being hurried down the aisles by ushers in white shirts and blouses, black slacks and long skirts. From the foyer the sound of the final bell.

  The house lights are dimmed and the hall hulled in dusk. Silence falls, broken only here and there by a cough, the rustling as pages of a programme are folded. Eyes remain on the orchestra seated in the extravagant white light.

  Applause when the mayoress, smiling, in a long black dress and a double string of pearls, walks to the centre of the stage. Standing behind a microphone to the left, she lifts a piece of paper and dons a pair of delicate reading glasses, throwing her head back as if clearing strands of hair from her vision. An elegant movement. ‘Honourable Prime Minister, Dr John Vorster, honoured guests, ladies and gentleman, and citizens of South Africa who join us this evening in their homes through radio and the year-old gift of television. Welcome to Durban, proud ocean city and holiday getaway of all South Africa. And also — let us not forget — centre of culture and arts.’ Applause from the audience and the mayoress again smiles and nods. ‘But, we are not gathered here this evening to listen to orations or public sermonising. We are here to celebrate and enjoy the universal language of music. Indeed, in all the world, the only truly unifying form of communication is the language of music.’ Applause breaks her stride and again she smiles, nodding at the audience and into the camera of the centre aisle. ‘Dr Vorster, it is an honour for every citizen of this city to welcome you in our midst this evening.’ Applause. ‘On behalf of the city, may I present to you and the country the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Symphony Orchestra and Philharmonic Choir, joined tonight — in celebration of a wonderful school’s twentieth anniversary — by the internationally renowned choir of young gentleman from the Drakensberg, united under the leadership of Mr Jacques Cilliers.’ A loud round of applause and she briefly inclines her head and leaves the stage.

  Applause again as almost at once the choir begins filing onto stage: boys in azurite waistcoats and white bibs, alternating in rows with the adults of the SABC choir in sky-blue togas. Somewhere in the middle of the hall, an observant audience member might noticea father nudge a boy seated beside him dressed in the school’s black blazer with its badge of the dragon; a woman in the row behind leans forward and squeezes the boy’s neck. The boy, smiling coyly while his eyes are glued to the stage, in turn leans lightly against the girl beside him who in turn does the same to the girl beside her who in turn elbows the taller boy — also in the black blazer — beside her.

  Only when the two-hundred-strong choir is ordered and standing with arms held behind their backs does the applause abate. Then it begins again as the orchestra rises and the conductor enters the lights. His black suit, white shirt and charcoal hair are aglow beneath the spots. A good-looking man. He bows at the Prime Minister’s box. He lifts his arm towards the orchestra and choir, signalling them to bow. While the applause continues the conductor shakes the hand of the lead violinist and the orchestra is again seated. The hall goes quiet only when the man turns his back to the audience and faces the orchestra and choir. At a nod from the man, four boys step forward and take their places behind microphones just in front of the violins. The choir’s face lights up. Teeth glint in the stage lights. The conductor’s profile is in view as he and the solo quartet silently converse. Four heads nod at him. He again faces the choir. Then he turns and seems to say something quiedy to the lead violinist. The violinist rises, places his instrument on his seat and moves to the microphone of the skinny soloist on the left. As he adjusts it to a lower height, the audience laughs and the boy’s smile can probably be seen to the very back of the top gallery. Once the violinist has again taken his seat and placed his instrument against his chin, he nods.

  The conductor lifts his hands.

  His head moves from
side to side, taking in orchestra and choir. He nods, hands show the time and in the instant the conductor’s hair jumps and his arms fly forward the orchestra eliminates the silence with the thudding of drums the lashing of trumpets and Karl’s skin is turned to gooseflesh. His eyes dart from the back of Jacques’s neck and shoulders to Dominic’s face, a fresh pink bloom beneath thelights into the dark. There they remain. On his left sits Bok and Bokkie. Then Mumdeman and her fiance, Mr Shaw, who Karl met tonight for the first time. Stinking rich, apparently, and after they’re married he’s taking Mumshaw on honeymoon to Europe. To his right are Alette, Lena, Lukas and Juffrou Sang. In the row immediately behind are Uncle Michael, Aunt Siobhain and James.

  Karl counts silently for the second alto entry to precede Dominic’s Kyrie. The voice rises, leaps, then tumbles into the hall. Tears well in Karl’s eyes. He blinks a few times in quick succession. His mind drifts, even as his eyes remain on Dominic, then setde momentarily on Jacques and then return to Dom. He knows each note. Can fall in with the second sopranos, and all the others too, he now realises. Without knowing he is doing it, he anticipates automatically each major instrument entry. How different this mass of sound; how enormous in the joining with the adults. This overwhelming volume was what Dominic spoke of when he came back from Jo’burg bearing news of the rehearsals’ success, of the flawlessness of the recording sessions at the EMI Brigadiers Studios.

  Finding Karl and Lukas milking in the dairy, Dominic had fallen at once into a story of the days the combined boys’ choirs had spent with the adult choir in Johannesburg. The two who had remained behind on the farm had heard the buses arrive but decided to wait to greet their friends at supper. When Dominic walked into the dairy ten minutes later, Lukas joked that it was probably the first time he had set foot there for three years. ‘Damn right!’ Dominic responded as his eyes took in the rickety beams of the old shed and then came to rest on Karl hunched over the bucket at the flank of a black and white Friesian: ‘I don’t know how you can stand the smell and the flies. Anyway, you don’t know what you missed.’ Despite his avowed aversion to the dairy and its activities, he went down on his haunches beside Karl. ‘You do that well, hey, Karl,’ whispered and chuckling. Then, speaking loud enough so that Lukas on the other side of the walkway could hear, he told about Mr Cilliers’s masterful control overthe two-hundred-strong combined choir; how he consistently and patiently signalled the adult voices to diminuendo while allowing them, the boys, a slight crescendo. Dominic spoke about how starkly different the Mass was with full orchestration and with the added colour of adult voices for whom Beethoven had originally composed the piece. And then the recordings, that a year of hard work, of hours upon hours of repetition and bowing before Cilliers s outbursts and violence had paid off thousand-fold. ‘This Mass is going to be world-class. Ludwig would have shat himself with satisfaction,’ Dominic said and briefly rested his hand on Karl’s knee.

  It is as glorious as he said. More. Perfect, perfect. How I wish I could be facing here rather than there. Skipping the alternate rows of adults, he runs his eyes along the faces of the boys. One hundred and eighteen. In all likelihood he will never see most of them again. Most of these have rarely meant anything to him. They were but names and presences. Faces in the wall of choir voices. A rare few of them trained for galas with him. A number were regulars at the stables. A dozen or so with Lukas and him in the rugby team. His only real friends Bennie, Dominic, Lukas and Mervyn. For all he had cared the school might actually have existed of only himself and the four of them. Yet now he sees each face as a composite part of his world. Remove one and the world is irrevocably altered. A world he is now set to leave. For the first time since he’d stopped singing, he allows thoughts of loss; allows regret and sadness, thick and clotting like old blood through his veins. With self-reproach he takes in each face as he prepares his leave: The solo quartet: Dominic, Beloved, Dearest. Again he blinks. Erskin Louw. Gerhard Conradie. Mike van der Bijlt. On the stands above and behind the orchestra: Ronald Gardener. J.P. Vermeulen. Patrick Moore. Roelf Sianagi. Johan Rademan. Toings van Breda. Laurie Donohue. Lloyd Heyns. Jonathan Thompson. Casper Wigget. Marcus Smith. Alex Snyman. Gideon Fichardt. Tom Spencer. Niklaas Bruin. Mathew O’Leary. Henkie Geldenhuys. Radys

  Dietz. Fritz Naude. Bryan Keating. Andre Marais. Peter Wilmot. Steve Dugmore. Ryan Burgess. Jannie Prinsloo. Riaan Mastenbroek. Mark Bosman. Faffa van Niekerk. Eben Stein. Gert Malan. Peter Muller. Ron Isaacson. Jelly-face Johnson. Peter-John De Waal. Neil Barry. Sean Aucamp. J.J. Cartwright. Sarel Serfontein. Craig Nichols. Barrie Hansen. Rudie Campher. Deon Cilliers. Ian Stoltenberg. Joseph Sniegowski. Pieter Opperman. Michael Sayers. Bennie Oberholzer. Daniel Smit. Percy Johnstone. John Cooke. Stony Steenkamp. Mervyn Clemence-Gordon. Mervy. Max Brown. Jean-Pierre Kotze. Armand Gouws. Errol what’s your surname. Johan De Wet. Christopher Jones. Paul Shaer. Marius Theron. Van van der Merwe. Frik Olivier. Sprinter Snell. Braam Naude. Graham Schmidt. Neville Kotze. Bernard Fischer. Fanus Du Preez. Connor Bruce. Brendan Baker. Naas Stein. Jaco Terblanche. Abel Pauw. Stephan van der Spuy. Clive Macpherson. Gilbert Erasmus. Anton Olckers. Wimpie Jansen. Herman Knudsen. Petrus Meintjies. Craig Kirchoff. Sarel Raubenheimer. Leon Du Toit. Sam Roberts. Christo Scholtz. Wessel De Jager. Cameron Burton. Theo Dippenaar. Llewelyn Connery. Kevin Field. Percy Johnstone. Tommy Mijnhard. Gerdus Serfontein. Coca Cola McCarthy. Peet van der Westhuizen. Chari Oerder. Hennie Potgieter. Paultjie Kruger. Andreas Voigt. Nathan Hammond. Jakkie De Villiers. Joe Knowles. Douglas Cochrane. Ettienne Mensing. Richard Ehlers. Rodney Tait. Stoffel Smuts. Paul De Waal. Gustav Edison. Royce Glover. Benjamin Davis. Charles Spontini. Louis Coetzee.

  Each name. To mind as if passed over his lips a hundred times. Now he wishes for a moment to speak with each. Alone. To say in some way he will miss them. As much as they frequently disliked each other, hated even. Now it’s all over. Nothing of that matters. A type of little death. ‘You should spend the energy caring for the living you do on the dying . . . That will make the world a better place. You pretend you ever cared.’ Fuck off. I did. Always. In my way.

  He wishes he were beside Lukas rather than Alette. Even withoutbeing able to speak, he is sure he would be in a better position to sense what his friend is thinking. Feel what Lukas is about not being on that stage. And this, after all, is the last. After all that, this is how it ends. How bleak. Grim. Grimm. It is beautiful; it is breathtaking, and despite being here and not there, he is still part of it. It would have been ideal to have Lukas on his right and Alette on his left and maybe Mumdeman beside Lukas on the other side. Mumdeman must be out of her skin with pride. Mumdeman in the multi-coloured robe of soft silk that Lena said made her look like the Messiah. ‘There’s only one Messiah, Lena,’ Mumdeman said with a scowl of displeasure, ‘and you’ll know when you come face to face with him.’

  Since Karl had introduced Lukas to Mumdeman in the foyer, she had taken an immediate liking to her grandson’s friend. That Lukas sprung from farming stock was all she needed to hear before she began reeling off tales of her own girlhood as daughter to a pioneer farmer in East Africa. Lukas, ever the listener, was soon eating from her hand: how she and the Mostert family had left South Africa and how she was born just through Portuguese Mozambique on an ox-wagon. And that when she marries Mr Shaw in two months’ time he’s taking her to London and then for a trip on the Concorde to Paris. ‘From an ox-wagon to the Concorde! All in one lifetime,’ she said as a group began gathering around the De Mans in the foyer, spellbound by Mumdeman’s stories. She told what Karl had never tired of after hearing them a hundred times in a hundred different versions: how they had cleared the bush to create a civilisation in East Africa; that at one point there were as many as two thousand white families between Kenya and Tanganyika. ‘None of the mod cons you girls take for granted,’ she said, smiling at the younger women in the group: ‘These hands,’ turning her palms up, pulling back the silk sleeves, ‘I cleared a farm with these two hands. Look you can see, they’ve never re
ally recovered.’ And she asked the bystanders to touch the inside of her open palms. ‘Ten thousand hectares.’ Lukas asked what they had farmed, and she spoke about thousands of acres of vegetables. And Lukas, clearly delighted, prodded for more. Karl, himself gratified at the audience, intervened and asked her to tell how she had wrestled a crocodile in Lake Tanganyika. Mumdeman proceeded, and Mr Shaw smiled and put his arm around her back as she grew more animated and another group joined the widening circle. From crocodile wrestling she went to picking custer apples and being chased by wild dogs, said again that today s women could learn a thing or two from the way she grew up. During a lull in her stories, someone, upon seeing the two boys in the black school blazers, asked: ‘And why aren’t the two of you singing?’ As one Lukas and Karl answered: ‘Our voices are breaking.’